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When all is said and done ...

February 23, 2010

With congressional hearings scheduled well into next month, a lot more certainly will be said about Toyota's spate of recalls and how NHTSA handled the investigations. When it's all done, though, what will it mean to the automotive enthusiast?

Perhaps this: By law, all cars might have to be equipped with an electronic "brake override" that cuts the engine back to idle when the driver applies the brakes. Toyota started installing the system in January in cars affected by its floor-mat and accelerator-pedal recalls.

A government mandate seems likely, given the precedents: the transmission interlock (requiring use of the brake before shifting into gear) that followed the Audi "sudden acceleration" incidents and the mandate for tire-pressure monitors that came after the Ford Explorer-Firestone debacle.

But even if Congress or NHTSA doesn't mandate brake override, the scale of Toyota's latest encounter with the decades-old, industrywide unintended-acceleration phenomenon will motivate other automakers to join BMW, Volkswagen, Audi, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and Chrysler in putting a brake override in new cars. Their lawyers will insist.

If so, forget about advanced driving techniques that use both pedals simultaneously, such as left-foot braking into a turn (a rally-driver favorite), brake-torquing for a quick launch from stop (as in drag racing with an automatic) and even--if a mandate does not exempt manual-transmission models--heel-and-toe downshifting. Can it be coincidence that Nissan, which has brake override in all of its models, pioneered SynchroRev Match, a system that automatically blips the 370Z's throttle during downshifts, eliminating the need for heel-and-toe?

The concerns of a handful of skilled drivers, however, are unlikely to carry much weight in a crisis that arguably wouldn't be so large if all drivers were trained in car control. An adept driver who understands how cars work and the basics of vehicle dynamics knows what to do with a stuck throttle: Brake hard, with both feet on the pedal if necessary. Throttles sometimes got stuck long before the electronic "drive-by-wire" systems that some critics implicate in Toyota's problems, often for the same reasons Toyota contends are at issue today: out-of-position floor mats or mechanical failure in the pedal or linkage.

Brakes are stronger

Brakes are always stronger than engines, as long as you use them to come to a complete stop immediately. If your first reaction is to brake lightly to limit the acceleration and maintain a steady speed while you figure out what to do next, you can generate heat-induced fade, so the brakes don't work as well when you decide to stop. Even if the brakes fail, you can shift to neutral and let the engine race: Rev limiters in modern cars will protect the engine from damage until you can pull over and shut it off.

Few drivers know these things, though, and ignorance leads to fear and fear to panic. As much as we might like to say driver education would solve this, it's probably too much to expect every driver to exhibit the calm-in-a-crisis attitude of a fighter pilot.

Are the media overblowing these incidents? Yes, but that doesn't absolve Toyota of mismanaging its own crisis, and recalls affecting more than 8 million cars qualify as a crisis. While Toyota's reputation for quality was well earned, it was never as perfect as it was depicted in the nonautomotive press. That reputation helped it when the engine-sludge problem generated lawsuits in the '90s and VW, for one, took a harder hit.

Similarly, the uneven sensation in the Prius brake pedal during the transition from regenerative to mechanical braking has been noted by enthusiast magazines through all three generations of Toyota's hybrid. Now it's been drawn to the attention of mass-market consumers, most of whom still don't know how to use ABS. The result is a recall for a software fix applied in later-production cars. In a less-heated atmosphere, the decision to upgrade the system in the middle of a production run might have been cited as an example of Toyota's doctrine of continuous improvement at work. But today the company is taking hits for "concealing a problem."

Plenty of complaints

A cursory search of the NHTSA Web site reveals other complaints and investigations involving Toyota products through the years, though fewer than for most other automakers. Perfection in the complex manufacture of cars is a worthy but unachievable goal.

While there are unintended-acceleration complaints on file for virtually all automakers, Toyota is disproportionately represented, and not only in raw numbers (which you might expect from the best-selling automaker). According to a Consumer Reports study of complaints in 2008, one in 50,000 Toyota owners experienced an incident of unintended acceleration, worse than Ford (one in 65,000) and 10 times worse than General Motors vehicles (one in 500,000).

Some, including Steve Beshear, governor of Kentucky (where Toyota has plants), suggest that politics is at play. Beshear urged fairness in upcoming hearings: "They deserve a level and reasonable response from the federal government, one that is not tainted by the federal government's financial interest in some of Toyota's competitors."

The implication seems far-fetched--NHTSA has ongoing investigations into products by both recipients of government loans, Chrysler and GM, including a recent one into alleged failures in electric steering assist on 950,000 Chevrolet Cobalts, even though the record of more than 1,300 complaints shows only one injury accident.

Reading the unintended-acceleration complaints at www.nhtsa.gov and in a Feb. 5 analysis by Safety Research and Strategies critical of both Toyota and NHTSA (www.safetyresearch.net), we noted some surprises. While media reports concentrate on a few spectacular fatal accidents, many owners documented more than one experience of the problem without serious crashes, some as many as six or more. Many responded appropriately to stop a runaway car without crashing. Some even blamed themselves initially, assuming they'd applied the wrong pedal--until repeated incidences convinced them otherwise.

So the record suggests that many drivers do respond appropriately. Toyota's growth has resulted in deeper market penetration among drivers who don't much care about cars and driving, but that alone can't account for its disproportionate representation in the complaint files.

Critics say the mechanical problems with floor mats and pedal assemblies do not suffice to explain the problem and that neither Toyota nor NHTSA has done enough to rule out electronic or software failures, out of a bias toward mechanical or driver-error causes. But, as was the case with Audi when electronics were far less advanced than today, it's hard to credit a failure that both induces acceleration and defeats the brakes.

No one seems to recognize the irony in prescribing a cure--the override--that is yet another electronic means of doing something drivers used to be able to handle.